Dark and Darker is back

 For now.  

If there is one state of being that every indie developer wishes for their game, it is that one immortal moment of 'viral sensation'. That state of being where content creator's adopt the work of marketing and give away the virtues of your game to their audiences of potentially millions, providing the game that chance to snowball into the general consciousness. From this height many a classic video game has made it's mark as mainstays of game lovers, and many more have prolonged their lifeline far past the span fitting for the actual quality of the product in question. (I have no doubt that without virality, 'ARK: Survival Evolved' would have died off long before it's first expansion.) And it was this very venerated position that the Dark and Darker extraction game found itself in.

Taking the niche competitive multiplayer genre of 'extraction shooter' and transposing it to an engagingly generic fantasy setting, Dark and Darker managed to appeal to a vast swathe of people who liked the genre but found the sweaty weapon-culture insulation of 'Tarkov' unappealing; which as it turns out was a good chunk of potential players. It was approachable, simple, inexpensive and balled up a lot of potential promise to only get better as the early access title trundled towards launch... of course, that was until the game found itself afoul of legal troubles thanks to apparently stolen assets borrowed from the library of a soulless mega-developer responsible for such over-bloated antiquation as Maple Story. Truth behind the situation non-withstanding- the result is that Dark and Darker got itself booted off the biggest platform around, Steam.

Now any game that isn't being sold on Steam might as well be getting hawked from the back of someone's 4x4 truck in the middle of nowhere- because that's just not where the audience is. As we see independent marketplace after independent marketplace fall to bloody pieces, forcing Ubisoft games and Blizzard games to endure the walk of shame back to Valve's doors, it's becoming more obvious that the front page of PC gaming is essential to any sort of gaming success. If you can afford the 100 dollar buy in, you're open to the biggest marketplace in the world and the competition hold high standards for entry. Which is why Dark and Darker now being hosted on it's own independent website is a bit of a kick to the unmentionables, I'm sure.

The centralisation of the PC marketplace is an unfortunate reality, but it's born out of a desire for convenience. Which is probably why even with the momentum that Dark and Darker already has by reputation alone, it's CEO is not at all happy with the state of affairs they have to deal with. He said himself how they "Cannot just ignore the largest PC storefront in the world" in a PCgamer statement. So this isn't just a case of lying down and letting their opponents at NEXON strangle their potential distribution avenues, this is more of just an emergency measure to ensure the game can get out there to someone, and fans can have some kind of game to rally behind. And whether that ends up paying off for the team or hurting them in the long run is really going to whittle down into a toss-up by the end of the day.

Over the months we've heard a lot of interesting information regarding this whole 'asset rights' arguement which leaves matters somewhat murky in the public eye. Of course the rebel in us all wants to just rally behind IRONMACE and call NEXON a slew of offensive names for their jealous litigation, but within the legal world they operate out of (Korea) some knowledgeable pundits seem to think there's a genuine case to be made. In the court of morality there really shouldn't be any problem with two rough starter games that both want to make the best out of a burgeoning genre, but the court of Morality is a poor man's refuge in a world owned by the rich. What we want hardly amounts to a fart in the wind when the powers that be get swinging.

I just wonder if, even assuming the best of everything for IRONMACE, that moment of captured lighting in a bottle has just passed. That burst of excitement for the brand new game on the block really peaked just before it was shoved off of shelves and that's not really the sort of fervour you can naturally drill up again. The world is fickle with it's affections and the belle of the ball today can become yesterday's news before a candle wick can burn out. Just look at Phasmophobia and how that game drifted, or the aforementioned ARK. Heck, even Minecraft, king of games that it is, has hills and valleys of public interest. IRONMACE might have, through the meddling of others, missed their chance to land with a splash that would have cemented them in gaming history.

Which just goes to show the unbalanced power of the big studios within the games industry, and the world at large but we try to keep things focused down here! I've just mentioned it recently but the spreading developer fear around the success of the independently developed Baldur's Gate 3 underlines a real misbalance of power between developers and producers in the industry. Even with a brilliant example of a game that did everything right, with a medium sized team, and meeting with a flurry of success- isn't enough to sway the hearts of the meticulous money men who whittle all human life down to flicking diodes on their CRT monitor. Developers are terrified that the industry will start to recognise that Larian's way of developing is better for the industry, because they know their paymasters will never even consider it. Developers are all kept-artists, worried about their restrained schedule workload becoming critically obsolete.

IRONMACE aren't giving up their position. I can only imagine it's quite the potential legal minefield to wantonly forgo their selling ban in the middle of proceedings. I really hope that it ends up working out for them, though- because even if this isn't really the kind of game I'd like to play, or even find that interesting to watch, I respect the work of indie developers and the kind of genuine excitement that can still drum up in a world that feels more and more synthetic and safe with every passing year. The rough bones of Dark and Darker today could very well lay out the foundation of a genre leader five years from now if all goes well. Of course, then the game will inevitably go the way of Destiny and lose all of it's potential in a vain pursuit of endless player engagement- but I choose to fight for the now, let the future sort it's own stuff out!